Lacrimae Rerum
by Stillicidium
Summary: "Lacrimae rerum" - Virgil; "Tears for things" Near's life was overshadowed by those tears, the ones that were forbidden from flowing.
1. Ludo

**"Lacrimae rerum" -Virgil; "Tears for things"**

My earliest memory is of soft, weak arms wrapped around me. I am sitting on a girl's lap on the floor, and her dark hair falls in front of my face. Every so often I feel a drop of water on my hands, which are resting on the hands of the person embracing me. I know she must be crying, and I want to make her feel better because the fact that this girl is sad makes me feel sad, and I am afraid that I too will start to cry. I know that crying is bad. To distract myself from the sadness, I reach for an action figure lying near the girl's bare foot. I can't reach the toy, so I squirm out of her grasp and grab the toy. She quickly grabs me back and holds me closer, her soft crying becoming a little louder. She says something to me. I pat her foot and continue to play with the toy.

**x.X.x**

The man slammed the door as he came into the house. He smelled of alcohol, but then again, the entirety of the small apartment did. Melissa called him "Father", but I never, save one incident, spoke to him, so I did not call him anything. Melissa was my older sister. She was eight years old, my senior by three years. She would often play with me, and was doing so when the man came in. Melissa always stopped playing when he came home.

"Good evening, Father," Melissa said to him when his heavy boots grew close to us. She stood up. She hadn't taken off her nightgown at all that day, nor had I my pajamas, and the sun had once again disappeared past the buildings of the city, leaving the world a darker, scarier place.

The man came closer to us, and Melissa pretended to be smoothing out invisible wrinkles in her nightgown. The man strode up next to her and violently ruffled her hair. She closed her eyes, recoiling at his touch.

"Wha-?" the man slurred. "You 'on't like me?" Melissa stood there with her eyes closed and her head down. "You talk me when I talk to you, girl!" The man followed his command with a slap across Melissa's face, sending Melissa sailing to the ground. Her dark hair fell in front of her face, but it was clear she was fighting back pain-filled tears.

"Aah! 'Elissa!" I cried and hurried over to her. The man was faster, though, and he kicked me away from her. "Melissa! 'Lissa!" I wailed.

Melissa lifted her head and looked at me. Her hair slid off her face, and I could see that the left side of her face was red. "Ignore it, Nate," she said to me, "and keep playing. Just don't pay any attention and keep playing with yo-"

"Shut up, girl!" the man cut her off. He kicked her in the side, and she let out an "oof". "Stand up, girl!" the drunk demanded. She began to lift herself up when he kicked her again. "Stand up!" Melissa stood, and the man grabbed a fistful of hair at the front of her head. He yanked hard so that her face was pointing up towards his. "You, girl, you come with me."

"Yes, sir," she said quietly.

"I said shut the fuck up, girl!" He yanked her hair again and she let out a yelp. He then released her hair in exchange for her wrist. He pulled her harshly, and she stumbled along behind him as he himself stumbled out of the room.

"Melissa!" I shouted. I didn't want her to leave the room. She made me feel safe when the man was there. I got up and ran to her. I grabbed the wrist the man wasn't holding and tried to tug her back towards me. The man noticed me struggling to set her free, and used his free hand to push me down. I felt like crying, but I wanted to be strong like Melissa, who hardly ever cried despite all she endured.

When Melissa saw me fall, she whimpered, "No." I am still unsure whom this was directed at. Her next words were for me, though: "Nate, just go back and play. Just go back and play with your toys and ignore everything, okay? Go play!"

This rather angered the man. He threw her in front of him and kicked her so that she went flying about a foot. Her face was full of pain; I'm amazed she didn't burst into tears right then. Melissa said nothing, but she looked at me and nodded. I knew she was telling me again to go play with my toys and ignore anything that happened. I reluctantly obeyed her, and sat back down on the floor, quietly using my toys to re-enact the scene that had just played out.

**A/N: I have decided to re-post this. I looked back on the original and it hurt my eyes, it was so poorly written. Ha, yeah, that may be an exaggeration. Anyway, I have edited it, and hopefully it's now better.**


	2. Donum

I awoke the next morning on the couch which served as my bed. I heard a sizzling sound coming from the kitchen and knew Melissa was making breakfast. She was very independent for a child of eight. She had to be, of course, given her circumstances. She told me once, in a memory that is to me only sound and no pictures, that we used to live with a woman. She said the woman was our mother. "But Mother was very sick. She would go to the doctor a lot. When she went to the doctor, a nice lady came and stayed with us until Mother returned," Melissa told me. "One day Mother didn't come back, though. The lady called some people and they came and made us live with these two guys. They were really nice, too. But then one day they said we had to leave because some people found Father, and Father wanted us to live with him." She said the man wasn't always mean, but soon he would start buying lots of cans of something, and he would drink them all. After drinking them, he would get angry, and he would hit Melissa and always be touching her. I was surprised she remembered all this while I had absolutely no recollection of any of it.

I slid myself off the couch and grabbed my Power Ranger action figure, which was lying exactly where I had left it. Then I picked up another toy and brought both of them with me to the kitchen. The man was never there during the day, so Melissa would be free to play with me.

Melissa smiled at me and said good morning when I entered the kitchen. The smell of bacon almost overpowered the smell of alcohol, and I loved it. I noticed Melissa had a dark bruise on the left side of her face from when the man had hit her. She also had purple marks on her wrist. Her body was already covered in bruises, so these were just added to the collection.

"Your food smells good," I commented as I tried to climb onto a chair at the kitchen table.

Melissa smiled again and put some bacon, dry bread, and a runny pancake on a plate for me. She placed the food in front of me and said, "That's good. I hope it tastes good too. Hurry up and finish, I have a present for you." I grinned when she told me. Her presents for me were always new toys. Well, the toys were actually taken out the Dumpster behind the building, but they were new to me.

I gulped down the food and began pestering her about my present, the way all small children do: "Can I have my present now? What is it? It's amazing, isn't it? Is it another Transformer toy?" – I loved Transformer toys; turning them from cars to robots and vice versa could entertain me for hours – "How big is it? Where is it? I can spell 'present', you know." I then spelled "present" for her, and she opened the refrigerator. From there she produced a box. She handed the box to me. It was cool to the touch from being in the refrigerator, was wrapped in clear plastic, and had a picture of zebras grouped together on it. "500 pieces" was written on the edge of the box.

"What is it?" I asked. I shook it. It sounded like there were a bunch of little presents inside. I started trying to scratch the plastic off of the box.

Melissa laughed. "It's a puzzle, silly," she said, and took a knife and cut the plastic off. She took the box from me. Lifting the lid off the box, she revealed a plastic bag full of little pieces of colored cardboard. She used her teeth to rip the bag open and poured its contents onto the table. I moved my breakfast plate so it wouldn't be in the way of the cardboard. "See? You take all these little pieces and fit them together to make this picture." She held up the lid with the picture of the zebras on it. "It's fun. You and me can do it together. It's got a lot of pieces, so it's gonna take a while, but it's fun!"

I didn't respond. I was staring down at the pieces on the table, deciding what to do with them. I did what Melissa had said I was supposed to do: fit the pieces together to make the picture on the box.

Melissa took my breakfast plate and placed it in the sink. She placed all the dishes she had used that morning, including the pans she'd used, into the sink as well. She began to wash them. While she washed them, she sang the _Scooby Doo_ theme song over and over again. Despite the noise of the running water and my sister's singing, the kitchen felt quiet to me because of the calm "clack" noise the puzzle pieces made as I put them together.

Finally the noise of running water and singing stopped. Melissa hopped off the chair she had been standing on in order to reach the sink and pushed it back towards the table. Before the chair was in its rightful place, however, Melissa paused and gaped at me.

I felt her staring and looked up. For a few more seconds she just stared, but then she started laughing. This confused me (Had the man shared some of his cans with her?). I asked her what she was laughing at.

"You're really something, you know," was the explanation she gave.

"Why? I'm some_body_, not some_thing_."

She laughed again. "You did the puzzle all by yourself, that's why, silly!"

I looked down at the puzzle, realizing that she was right. I had done the puzzle. Mostly. There were two pieces left. I put them in their proper places and exclaimed, "I did the puzzle! Can I do it again?"

"Of course you can. You just have to break the puzzle." She started mutilating the zebras on the puzzle, so that soon the table was a mess of puzzle pieces once more. "There you go. Now you can make it again."

I did the puzzle again, then took it apart and re-did it. I continued doing this, and Melissa just sat there staring at me. After completing the puzzle for the fifth time, I looked at Melissa and asked where she had gotten the puzzle. I knew she couldn't have gotten it from the store; the man would not allow us to leave the apartment except to bring trash to the Dumpster, and I doubted an unopened puzzle would be thrown away.

Melissa started to wring her hands. "Don't tell Father," she said. I nodded. "When I was taking out the garbage today, a door was open. I went inside, and it was somebody else's apartment. That puzzle was on a table, and I knew you'd like it, so I took it."

"You stole it?"

"Uh-huh," she replied, her voice sounding guilt-free.

For the remainder of the day until the man returned, Melissa and I said nothing to each other. When the man did return, what happened was basically a repeat of what had happened the previous night. As I played with toys to distract myself from whatever I felt I ought not think about as instructed by Melissa, I could hear her whimpering quietly in the other room. I was truly stunned to hear this, and I feared what it might mean.


	3. Telum

In the morning, Melissa seemed different. Not only did she have a few more bruises to add to her horrifying collection, but she seemed sad, which was highly unusual as she was always cheerful. I remembered the crying I had heard the previous night, and knew that something was dreadfully wrong with her.

"What's wrong, 'Elissa?" I asked her.

She didn't even pause to think about what to say before answering. "I took more than just that puzzle from the other people's apartment."

"Oh." I assumed she felt guilty for her crime. "Do you want to bring it back, then?"

She shook her head as if surprised that I would suggest this. "No, no, no. I need it. 'Sides, they might be bad people living there, and they shouldn't have what I took if they're bad."

I wanted to ask her what it was that she had taken, but before my words came out, a "diiing-dooong" noise filled the apartment. I looked up and sniffed the air, thinking it might be the sound of an odd smoke detector. The noise came again and Melissa hopped off her chair. "Coming," she called. She began shuffling towards the front door.

Melissa opened the door to reveal two young women standing there. They both wore backpacks and had brochures in their hands. One of the women scrunched her nose, probably revolted by the strong smell of alcohol emanating from the apartment, and the other woman's eyes went wide in surprise, probably shocked to find this beaten little girl in the apartment that smelled of alcohol. The latter woman crouched down so that her eyes were level with Melissa's. "Hello, little girl," the woman said, trying to act cheerful. The woman had a British accent, which I recognized because Melissa would sometimes speak with one while we played. "Are your parents home?"

Melissa clung to the doorknob as if it were a sacred gem she had been caught stealing but refused to give up. "Uh-uh," she said.

"No?" the woman clarified, her expression both confused and concerned. She stood up and looked at the other woman, who looked at her watch and shrugged her shoulders.

The woman who spoke looked back down at Melissa. "Hmm, okay... When they come home, could you give this to them?" She placed a brochure in Melissa's hand.

"Okay," said Melissa as she closed the door on the women. I could hear their voices coming from the other side of the door, but could not make out what they were saying.

Melissa came back to where I was sitting on the ground and sat down beside me. She put the brochure down near my feet.

"Melissa, what was that noise?" I curiously inquired.

Melissa cocked her head to the side. "What noise?"

"The noise that came before you went to answer the door. It sounded like 'diiiiinnng doooonnng'."

"Oh, that was the doorbell." I expected her to call me silly. She didn't. "It's a button people press near the door outside. When they press it, it makes a noise like that to tell the people in the apartment that somebody's at the door."

"Oh." There was a quiet pause after this. I wanted my puzzle. I had a feeling that the clicking noise would distract me from Melissa's sadness, which would come as a wonderful relief to me. I looked around me, but I didn't see the puzzle, so I decided to ask Melissa where it was. When I started talking, though, that's not what I said: "Melissa, I'm hungry. Can you get me some food?"

Melissa swallowed as if thinking of food herself, and stood up, affirming my request. She went into the kitchen and came back with apple slices in her hands. "Here. You can eat." She set the apple slices on the dirty carpet for me to take some.

I started eating an apple slice and picked up a brochure. Out of boredom, I began reading the brochure out loud: "Donate life, become an organ donor. There are many people in this country who nee-"

"Stop," Melissa interjected.

I looked up from the brochure. "Why?"

"Because."

"Because why?"

"Just because! I don't want to hear you reading that!" she shouted.

I only looked at her, unsure of how to react. I hadn't even know Melissa was capable of yelling. I put the brochure down and ate another apple slice, wary of my actions for fear that Melissa would be angered. I wanted my puzzle.

The man returned late that day. At least, it felt late. The whole day had seemed very long due to Melissa's unhappy mood.

Melissa was in the kitchen, sitting near the cabinet where we kept the pots and pans. She had been there for the past half hour. The man, who didn't know where she was, started stumbling across the living room looking for her. His left boot bumped into me as I played with toys, trying to ignore everything. When this happened, the man looked down at me with surprise, as if he didn't know that I lived there or who I was. It's possible that he didn't; he was heavily intoxicated.

"Kid!" he slurred when he noticed me. "Ki-i-id!" I looked up, assuming I was the "kid" he was addressing. "You kid, you kid, you, you know where the girl is."

"Yes," I replied quietly.

"Where?" he demanded. I got up and sat on the couch with my toys. The man looked as if he were about to fall over, and I didn't want to be crushed by his enormous weight. The man was confused when I moved. "Wha-? What was...? You, you still gotta tell me, kid. You still gotta tell me, tell me where the girl is, you little kid-brat." Knowing that the man was likely to begin calling me worse names than "kid-brat" and that he'd do worse things than just call me names if I didn't do what he wanted, I pointed.

The man awkwardly turned his head in the direction I had pointed. Melissa was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. "Girl!" he cried upon seeing her. I doubt he even knew what her name was. "Girl, you was hiding from me!" A few moments later he screamed as if he realized that she had in fact been hiding from him, "Bitch, hiding from me!" He started staggering towards her, his hands clenched in fists of rage.

Melissa shakily held up her hand and pointed something black at the man. The thing she held reminded me of my toys, but I did not know why. Then I realized one of my action figures held something very similar to what she was holding: a gun.


	4. Cognosco

The fact that Melissa was pointing a gun at him did not seem to register in the man's mind. He kept moving towards her and began to swing his fists, trying to hit her despite the fact that he couldn't reach her.

Melissa stood her ground and shakily pulled the trigger of the gun, letting out a little yelp as she did so. The man immediately crumpled over; Melissa had fired a bullet right between his eyes. Blood began pouring out of his wound. I simply stared, not feeling anything.

Melissa started crying and ran over to the couch. She sat down and embraced me. Her breaths came out in shudders. Her arms were wrapped tightly around me, and her dark hair fell in front of my face, providing an astonishing contrast compared to my own white locks in front of my face. A feeling of deja vu settled over me.

Melissa let out another sob. All the tears she had been holding back for as long as I could remember were finally being permitted to escape. She buried her face in my hair, and I put my toys down. Then I felt her head pull away from my own, and her quiet, shaky voice whispered into my ear, "Nate... I, I want you to keep playing with your toys, okay? Remember how I tell you to play with your toys and ignore everything? I want you, I want you to do that now. P-play with your toys. Okay? Keep playing, just keep playing and make yourself feel good. Keep playing, okay? Keep playing..." She unwrapped one of her arms from me. I heard another gunshot, a much louder one this time. Melissa's grip on me loosened and she fell over.

It was then that I decided I didn't like my sister very much after all.

**x.X.x**

When the police arrived, I was still sitting there on the couch, playing with my toys. Melissa's body was crumpled behind me, her hand still laying on my lap; I had not dared move it.

The police, to my disappointment, did not ring the doorbell. They barged through the unlocked door with their guns drawn. Upon seeing two dead bodies and a small child calmly playing with toys, one of the officers put her gun down and walked over to me. The other officer walked cautiously around the apartment with his gun, prepared to shoot any threatening survivors.

"Hi," said the officer who had walked over to me in a voice that gave me the impression that she believed herself to be a child whisperer. "What's your name?"

I looked up at her. The only part of her face that I can remember are her small, brown eyes, which reminded me of Melissa's. I didn't answer her question.

"What is your name?" she repeated.

"Nate," I said in a small voice. I continued to play with my toys.

"Ah, Nate," she smiled. "Did you see what happened here?"

"Yes," I said, not looking up.

"Will you tell me what happened?"

"Melissa shot the man, then she shot herself."

"Oh, that must make you sad. It must have scared you."

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't actually know if I was sad or if anything had scared me.

"Hmm, well, it's okay now. Will you come with me?" she asked.

"Why?"

"You have to."

I accepted this explanation, knowing that I probably wasn't going to get a better one. "Oh."

I went with the woman and the officer once it was confirmed that there was no one else in the apartment. They took me down to the police station, where I had to repeat in great detail what had happened. They asked me many questions but would answer none of mine.

After they felt they had everything all sorted out about what had happened and why, they moved me into a small room with a small man. The man introduced himself as Mister Peters and asked me a number of questions: "Nate, it seems you are quite articulate for a child of... how old are you? Five? Six?"

"Five," I replied. The man nodded his head thoughtfully. He seemed quite interested in this knowledge.

"Five, quite articulate for a child of five. Do you know what 'articulate' means?"

"Yes."

"Ah, wonderful. And do you know how to read?"

"Yes."

"I see. What kinds of things do you read?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Anything."

"Anything, really? Wow. Do you read books that don't have pictures?"

"Yes."

"How many books would you say you've read that don't have pictures?"

"Two."

"And do you read lots of books that do have pictures?"

I shook my head "no".

"Oh? Why not, Nate?"

"We don't... there were only two books in the apartment."

"The two books without pictures?"

"Yes."

The man was taking notes as we had our conversation. He paused to scan his notes before asking, "And do you know what those two books were called?"

"Yes."

"What were they called?"

I could easily recall the names of the books. I had read them at least ten times before while Melissa was with the man. "One book was called _Alcoholics Anonymous - Big Book_, and the other was called _The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary_."

"Those are big books, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"And you read them all by yourself? No one read them to you?"

"No. I read them alone."

"Okay... Well, Nate now we're going to play some games, okay?"

"Okay."

The "games" we played were games with little metal pieces entrapped with one another. I had to take them apart and Mister Peters noted how fast I could do so. Then Mister Peters gave me what he called a "magic colors block", but was more commonly called a Rubik's cube. I was to solve the "magic colors block", and he timed me once again. Then he asked me a series of logic questions, which were still part of his "games". He seemed surprised when I told him the answers after he asked the questions. He then asked me more questions, but these were about my past, mostly about how I had learned things.

"Who taught you how to read?"

I thought back. I remembered Melissa reading to me from one of the books one time, trailing her finger underneath the words as she slowly pronounced them. I couldn't remember for how long she had read to me, but that was the last, and only, time she had ever read to me. After that, I could read independently. "My sister."

"How old were you when you learned to read?"

This question was one I was unsure of how to answer. Melissa had told me one day that I was five years old, but she had never informed me of my age any incidents prior, and I did not know when my birthday was. I answered as best I could: "Younger than I am now."

Mister Peters chuckled. "I see. Now, could you solve this math problem for me?" He wrote an equation down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. On the paper it was written: "19+22=_"

I stared at the paper, perplexed by the odd symbols surrounding the numbers. "No."

Mister Peters was surprised. "No? You can't? You don't know how to?"

"No, I don't."

"I see..."

Mister Peters wrote something down in his notes and then asked his final question: "Nate, how old did you say you were again?"

"Five, Mister Peters."


	5. Lacrimo

When finally all of the questioning was over, I was shuffled to a police car by a short, red-haired woman. We rode quietly along, never stopping, not even for a red light (we amazingly managed to hit all greens), until we pulled up in front of a big, white house with dying sunflowers in front of it.

"Oh-kee, out of the car," the red-head said to me. She walked with me up to the front door and rang the doorbell. I could hear the doorbell's ring, and I smiled slightly. The door was immediately opened by a tall man in an elegant robe. He ushered us inside, and I was made to wait in the kitchen while he and red-haired woman spoke to each other about something that must have been important because the man's eyebrows were furrowed and he kept nodding. Eventually the woman left, and the man came inside the kitchen.

"Hey there, tyke. Nate," the man said enthusiastically, "I'm Dan. I have a room all ready for you. It's real nice, if I do say so myself. Shame you won't be needing it long, or maybe for you that's a good thing." Dan laughed at this. He must have mistaken me for someone close enough to him to understand his inside joke. I did not look at him, and instead began to play with my hair.

Dan took no offense to my ignoring him, and cheerfully said, "Hey, c'mon, kiddo, you must be tired. Oh! Or are you hungry? Or both?"

I kept my head down and said, "I'm not hungry."

Dan chuckled and said to himself, "Shy little tyke, eh?" Then to me he said, "Okay, that's fine. How about we go on up to your room and you can sleep?"

I shook my head. "If you don't mind, sir, I'll sleep on the couch."

"Hmm? Well, okay. I'll get you a blanket."

I walked into the living room, which was visible from the kitchen, and lay down on the couch. Dan came in and put a blanket on me, then asked if I wanted him to stay with me. "No, sir, that's all right," said I.

"You sure?"

"Yes."

"Okay... Well, my room's right down that hall," he pointed to the hallway, "so if you need anything just call me, okay?"

"I understand."

Dan laughed to himself again and shook his head. Then he asked, "You afraid of the dark?"

I nodded my head slowly. "Yes."

Dan smiled. "I'll leave the hallway light and the kitchen light on the." He then bid me good-night and flicked off the light in the living room, but, as promised, he left the lights in the hallway and kitchen on.

Dan had no toys in his living room. So, I played with my hair until I fell asleep, honoring my sister's last wish.

When I woke up in the morning, Dan was sitting in an easy chair reading a newspaper that looked like it was in some other language (perhaps Japanese?). I sat up, and he saw I had awoken. "Good morning there, sport," he said to me, then called out to the kitchen, "Mister Wammy? He's awake now."

Into the living room from the kitchen stepped an old man in a suit. "Wonderful," said the man in a British accent, "I was afraid I might have to wake him up myself. Planes wait for no man, you know."

Dan smiled. "I guess that means you two'll need to be leaving soon."

"Yes, I'm afraid we must," the old man said. The man looked down at his watch. "Oh my. It seems we must be leaving immediately, actually."

"Oh, you mean it? So there's no time for Nate to have breakfast?"

"No, no, I'm afraid we've squandered too much time. Oh, aeroplane food isn't that bad. Come along, Nate. Let's go. Oh, good, I see you've your shoes already on. Come, come."

I wasn't sure what to do. "Bye-bye, Nate," Dan said, smiling sadly. When he said this, I figured I had to go. The old man seemed friendly, anyway.

"Bye," I said to Dan and left with the old man. When we were outside, I asked the old man, "Who are you?"

The old man smiled down at me and replied, "I'm Mister Wammy, dear boy." He led me to a small, blue car and unlocked the doors for me to get in. I sat in the back and buckled my seat belt.

When the old man was in the car with me, he started the engine and said, "You know, you are a very special boy, Nate. Oh, but we shan't be calling you 'Nate' anymore. You'll be... We shall call you 'Near'. Is that acceptable?"

"Yes." I didn't care what I was called. It seemed I was rarely addressed by name anyway.

"Well, as I was saying to you, Near, you are a very special boy. You are very intelligent and you have great inner strength."

"I am? Do I?" I did not understand how this man would know these things or why he was telling me this, but I didn't let out the long string of questions I had inside me.

"Yes," Mister Wammy replied as we pulled away from the house with the dying sunflowers. "And because you are so special, you shall come to live in an orphanage especially for bright, young chaps such as yourself. This orphanage is in England, though, so we'll have to take a plane there."

"Oh. Okay." We rode along in a peaceful silence for the remainder of the trip, and the lack of distracting conversation gave me the opportunity to reflect on everything that had happened. As I replayed events in my head, a weak, solitary tear slid down my cheek. I did not wipe it away. It was the last tear I ever shed, and today I can still feel its cool trail on my face.

**A/N: Y ahora, la historia de la historia de Near termina. I hope it is one that shall be remembered.**


End file.
